A search through the records...

A funny thing, as someone was asking me today about if we knew whose children attended our kid’s classes, I remembered a story about such a question.

Years ago, some development people I knew got to worrying about just such an “opportunity”. Did we know whose children attended the kid’s classes? Maybe, they theorized, if we could find out, some kid all grown up and rich and famous or some parent, all rich and famous would bestow upon the school enormous sums of cash because we were responsible for all that early training.

They took off and ran with this idea and searched all available records going back for years. In the days before digital files, people pored through stored records in basements to try and find a name or a possible name and try and determine if that was the rich and famous name they recognized.

After much time spent in the records, they found one famous name. Unfortunately it was Alger Hiss (as a child)!

For those of you too young to know who this was, here is the Wikipedia version:

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American lawyer, civil servant, businessman, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and UN official. Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service, despite the fact that Chambers had previously testified under oath that Hiss had never been a communist. Called before HUAC, Hiss categorically denied the charge. When Chambers repeated his claim in a radio interview, Hiss filed a defamation lawsuit against him.

During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage, which each had denied under oath to HUAC. A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury; Chambers admitted to the same offense, but as a cooperating government witness he was never charged. Although Hiss's indictment stemmed from the alleged espionage, he could not be tried for that crime because the statute of limitations had expired.

After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time. In January 1950, he was found guilty on both counts of perjury and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served 44 months. Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. Although a variety of evidence has been added to the debate since his conviction, the question of Hiss's guilt or innocence remains controversial to some.

Various reports suggest that those who believe in Hiss's innocence are in the minority of scholarly opinion.

The development people decided that perhaps this was a useless venture, and the time could be best spent on more fruitful ideas.